SMERSH

Origins and establishment

SMERSH replaced earlier bodies. Until 3 February 1941 military counter-intelligence of the Red Army belonged to the 4th Department (Special Section) of the NKVD's Main Directorate of State Security, but that month the Special Section was separated from the NKVD into the 3rd Directorate of the Defence Commissariat, the 3rd Directorate of the Navy Commissariat and the NKVD's 3rd Department. After the German invasion of 22 June 1941, Stalin's State Defence Committee decree No. 187/ss of 17 July returned military counter-intelligence to the NKVD as the Directorate of Special Departments (UOO), headed by Viktor Abakumov.

With the front stabilised, a Council of People's Commissars decision of 19 April 1943 (No. 415-138ss) created on the basis of the UOO the Main Counterintelligence Directorate (GUKR) SMERSH of the Defence Commissariat under Abakumov and the Counterintelligence Directorate (UKR) SMERSH of the Navy Commissariat under Pyotr Gladkov. The Counterintelligence Department (OKR) SMERSH of the NKVD was created separately under that decision, by NKVD order No. 00856 of 15 May 1943; its first head was Semyon Yukhimovich, and when he moved to another post in May 1944 Vladimir Smirnov headed it until the end of the war. On 21 April 1943 Stalin approved the statute of GUKR SMERSH by State Defence Committee decision No. 3222ss/ov.

The three bodies were independent counter-intelligence units reporting only to the leadership of their own commissariats: GUKR SMERSH reported directly to Defence Commissar Stalin, the Navy's UKR SMERSH to Navy Commissar Nikolai Kuznetsov, and the NKVD's OKR SMERSH to NKVD Commissar Lavrenty Beria. The suggestion by some researchers that Beria and Abakumov used SMERSH structures to watch each other is not confirmed by archival documents.

Tasks and scale

The official statute listed SMERSH's tasks as counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism, preventing the activity of foreign intelligence in the Red Army, fighting "anti-Soviet elements" in the Red Army, protecting the front against penetration by spies and "anti-Soviet elements", investigating traitors, deserters and self-inflicted wounds, and checking military and civil personnel returning from captivity. The Russian Wikipedia recounts that in 1941 Stalin ordered a state check (filtration) of Red Army servicemen who had been in captivity or encirclement, and that a Council of People's Commissars decision of 6 January 1945 set up repatriation departments at front headquarters in which SMERSH officers worked. Filtration took place in front-line and army camps, assembly and forwarding points of the Defence Commissariat and NKVD verification-filtration points, while those needing further investigation were sent to NKVD special camps.

GUKR SMERSH headquarters numbered 646 men with 11 operational and 3 non-operational departments. The 2nd Department handled prisoners of war and the screening of Red Army servicemen who had been in captivity, the 3rd fought agents infiltrated into the Red Army's rear, the 4th ran work on the enemy side to identify agents being sent into Red Army units, and the 6th conducted investigations.

Wartime operations and repression

The main opponents of SMERSH in its counter-intelligence work were the Abwehr, the German field gendarmerie, the Reich Main Security Office, and Finnish and Romanian military intelligence. From 1943 to the end of the war the central apparatus and front directorates of SMERSH ran 186 radio games, drawing more than 400 enemy intelligence personnel onto Soviet territory and capturing dozens of tons of cargo.

At the same time SMERSH acted as a secret police inside the armed forces. An officer attached to each formation kept files on soldiers and officers with problematic biographies and recruited agents, and surveillance and threats of reprisal led to cooperation with the secret service and to unfounded accusations against servicemen and civilians. It has also been described as an instrument of political repression among the civilian population near the front; The Conversation relays the view that SMERSH was seen as more effective as an instrument of political repression than as a counter-espionage service.

SMERSH was not a judicial body and could not itself sentence anyone to imprisonment or shooting. Nevertheless detainees were frequently shot without trial, with no formalities, "under wartime law", and because such extrajudicial killings were not recorded or accounted for anywhere the exact number of those executed without trial remains unknown. Formally sentences were passed by a military tribunal or the Special Board of the NKVD, and arrests of middle-ranking commanders required the sanction of an army or front military council and those of senior commanders the sanction of the Defence Commissar, but this procedure was not always followed, and detentions were carried out without such sanctions and were not called arrests. Front-line service by operatives was extremely dangerous, with an average of three months before they were killed or wounded; in the fighting for the liberation of Belarus alone 236 military counter-intelligence officers were killed and 136 went missing.

SMERSH also played a large role in spreading the Stalinist system of terror to the countries of Eastern Europe where regimes friendly to the Soviet Union were established. Some former Nazi concentration camps in Poland and Germany are said to have continued operating after the war "under the aegis" of SMERSH as places of repression against ideological opponents of the new regimes; the evidence cited is information that more than 60,000 opponents of the socialist option were held for several years after the war in the former Buchenwald camp. According to Soviet archival data, however, 28,455 prisoners passed through that camp between 1945 and 1950.

Dissolution and afterlife

On 25 February 1946 the Defence and Navy Commissariats were merged into the Commissariat of the Armed Forces, reorganised as a ministry on 15 March that year, and on 4 May 1946 GUKR SMERSH under the Armed Forces Ministry was transferred to the Ministry of State Security (MGB) and transformed into the MGB's 3rd Main Directorate. In March 1953 this became the 3rd Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and later the 3rd Main Directorate of the KGB, which also performed military counter-intelligence.

The name SMERSH became widely known through literature and film, and appears in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels as a Soviet intelligence service. In December 2023 Andrei Gurulev of the Russian Duma's defence committee announced that an agency resembling the old SMERSH had been revived in the territories of Ukraine controlled by Russian forces.